Directors Who Treated Their Actors Like Garbage

Sometimes directors are willing to do ANYTHING to get the perfect shot. Even at the expense of their actors. This list is going to start out pretty light-hearted but as we go down the list the directors become more and more cold-blooded and horrible.

1. Michael Bay In Every Movie

There is not a single actor who has worked with Michael Bay and enjoyed it. Just some of the actors who hate him are as follows
Shia Lebouf
Sean Connery
Martin Lawrence (To the point that they almost got into a fight while filming “Bad Boys”)
Megan Fox (Literally called him Hitler)
Bruce Willis
Ben Affleck
And those are just the actors who have been vocal about their hate. Bay often has long screaming fits toward his actors seemingly for no reason. It would be pretty hard to work with that.

2. John McTiernan “Die Hard”

This one is pretty light-hearted in comparison to some of the others but still pretty awful. At the climax of Die Hard when Alan Rickman’s character is dropped from the building, he was told he would be dropped at the count of 3. Instead, the director thought his reaction would be better if they dropped him at the count of 1. That’s why Rickman’s fear is so genuine; he was dropped 25ft without warning.

3. David Fincher “Fight Club”

*Strong Language Warning*

I hate to break it to you but for the most part fights in movies are fake. Even in “Fight Club”. Except for one notable example. Remember the scene where Pitt says to Norton “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” Originally Norton was supposed to lightly punch Pitt in the face but last minute Fincher privately instructed Norton to punch Pitt as hard as he could. Pitt was obviously both surprised and upset.

4. Alfred Hitchcock “The Birds”

Alfred Hitchcock was notoriously terrible to women he worked with. With Tippi Hedren however it was especially horrible. Remember all the times she was acting terrified of the birds? She wasn’t acting.
Hitchcock only cast Hedren because she was relatively unknown in Hollywood and would do anything for a role so when he started throwing live birds at her so they would scratch, peck and poop all over her she didn’t try to leave the movie. At one point Hitchcock literally tied a flock of live birds to here and one them nearly scratched out her eye.

5. Stanely Kubrick “The Shining”

Everyone knows Kubrick was a perfectionist. Few know that his perfectionism made him super villain levels of evil when making a movie. For “The Shining” he wanted Shelley Duvall’s character to become more and more stressed and petrified over time. He accomplished this by actively terrifying her and stressing her out. It turns out that he made the set particularly hostile for Duvall just because he wanted her fear to be more authentic. It got to the point where Kubrick had her so stressed her hair literally started falling out. One of the awful things he put her through actually broke a record. Remember the scene where Duvall swings a baseball bat at Jack Nicholson? Kubrick made her do 127 takes over two straight days. This broke the record for “most retakes of a single movie scene with spoken dialogue.”